Future of PHP

[a_bertrand]

The old PHP 6 project died... and was instead renamed PHP 5.3, which introduced a lot of breaking changes but not that much of new features in my opinion. Yet why did they want to get with PHP 6? Easy: support for more than simple characters, so for example support for Chinese or other character sets than the US plain and boring. This means that all the GET / POST / COOKIES, Database, and file handling should be able to support those character set. Even the code comments should handle those, which means in principle a huge change in the engine behind PHP and that was the goal of PHP 6.

Now, as it wasn't so successful and was taking ages, they decided to deliver a first intermediate version as PHP 5.3 and re-think about what to do with this support of complex strings. One way would be instead of rewriting would be to add a new set of class which support those strings. The same approach has been taken by many before and leaded to a huge mess (where you could use 3-10 different classes to handle strings and no easy way to go from one to the other), but so far they didn't took any decision.

You may check the whole here:

http://schlueters.de/blog/archives/128-Future-of-PHP-6.html

Now remains to discuss how important those string handling are for you. If you code only in English and only for English people, you will gain nothing from those UTF or whatever. If you use accents or other special characters it may be of some use for you, however honestly for me it seems a lot of buzz for little content. I really hope they will come with more than simply handling special characters.

Please feel free to share your thoughts!